Is Writing Non-Fiction More Profitable Than Fiction?

Writing non-fiction has many advantages

While fiction and particularly romance seem to dominate self-publishing, non-fiction has a number of advantages when it comes to making money from your writing.

The biggest is that non-fiction offers enormous potential for online discoverability.

By this, I mean that the topic or subject of a non-fiction title is much easier to promote by using good keywords and SEO.

Keywords, of course, are gold when it comes to readers searching for and finding what they are looking for, either on Google, Amazon or by any other means of Internet search.

This, of course, is an extremely difficult task for fiction titles.

The second advantage of non-fiction is that there is an enormous market for ebooks in particular, as they offer a rapid means to access information and answers to questions that readers are hunting for on a particular topic.

Lastly, and probably most importantly, non-fiction books tend to be much shorter than fiction – in the range of 20-35,000 words.

While there is obviously more research involved, the actual writing time for a non-fiction title is obviously faster than for a novel of 100,000 words.

So, if you are currently writing fiction and not feeling that you are getting the financial rewards you would like, perhaps it is time to do some research and look at what possibilities there are in non-fiction writing for you.